Memory

Chapter Five

'Are you kidding?' Chiruwa said. 'I'm telling you, if we'd known there were raiders on the loose in the woods, we'd have been out of there so fast-'

The foundrymen nodded sympathetically. The story had grown a little each time it had been told, like a tree growing in rings. At the centre, the original lie, and radiating out from it the layers of embellishment. Pretty soon, Chiruwa would start believing it himself.

For his part, Poldarn was overjoyed to be back at Dui Chirra, standing in the cutting, grey sticky mud plastered up his legs. It was almost disturbing how relieved he'd been to come home. Things had started going well in his absence. The clay had dried without even a trace of a crack, and while Spenno smeared the tallow over the core, cursing fluently and reassuringly as his hands moulded the shape that would soon be the gap into which the metal would eventually flow, Poldarn and the rest of the courtyard hands were digging out material for the outer layer and the furnace itself. Good honest, useful work. If he wasn't careful, a man could kid himself into believing that this was what life is all about.

It would have been stretching the truth a little to say that everything was back to normal. For a start, ten of the courtyard crew had gone away and not come back. Presumably the government had buried their bodies, or nine of them at least, once they'd finished poring and scrabbling over the scene of the fight. But replacing them hadn't been difficult. There were always a certain number of displaced men wandering about during the rainy season, only too glad to dig clay or do anything they were told in return for shelter, a cooked meal and a bit of money.

'So what were you and your mates doing in the woods anyhow?' the investigating officer had asked them. He'd shown up at Dui Chirra two days after they'd got back; it was worrying that he'd found them so quickly.

'We were on our way to the colliers' camp,' Chiruwa had replied, innocent as a snowdrop. 'We reckoned we might find work there, to tide us over till this place got going again.'

The investigating officer had thought about that. 'Taking your time, weren't you?' he'd asked. 'I mean, it's not a long way to the camp from your place, and there's more direct routes.'

Chiruwa had nodded sadly; the weight of guilt on his shoulders would've crushed a roof. 'I know,' he'd replied. 'My fault, basically. I'd been on at them about keeping going, maybe as far as Tarwar or someplace like that; but then we heard there were bandits on the road, and I got scared, made us all turn back and head for the camp-and that's how come we walked straight into that party of raiders at just the wrong moment. If I hadn't got panicky about the bandits, the lads'd all still be alive-'

'Ah yes,' the officer had interrupted, 'those bandits. Didn't run into them by any chance, did you?'

'Us? No.'

'Interesting,' the officer had continued, 'because we've got witnesses who reckon there were twelve of them-the bandits, that is-and that just happens to be how many there were in your party. Still,' he'd gone on, ignoring Chiruwa's attempts to speak, 'that's really none of my business, I wasn't sent here to look into any alleged bandits. Now, how many raiders did you say you saw?'

As to who the boy in the coach had been, nobody seemed to know anything. The investigating officer had more or less confirmed that he'd been the son of someone very important indeed, but that was as far as he was prepared to be drawn. On the other hand, there hadn't been any wholesale reprisals, no villages burned or mass executions-which, in the view of the foundry crew, meant the kid couldn't have been anybody special. Raiders or no raiders, the consensus was, if he'd mattered a damn to anybody the government would've had to do something, even if it was nothing more than sending out a squadron of cavalry to lop off a few heads along the Falcata road. People had a right to know that their taxes are being used productively, after all.

'To understand the act of drawing the sword,' said the skinny old crow, 'it is first necessary to understand the nature of time.'

Ciartan, who'd been dozing (and in his doze he'd been dreaming about a place where a stream crossed a road in a forest, where a boy and a man were fighting, and both of them had been him) sat up and opened his eyes. He still hadn't got the hang of lectures; back home, where hardly anything needed to be said aloud, Oh look, the crocuses are out or It's your turn to feed the chickens counted as interminable speeches. Sitting still while someone talked at you for a whole turn of the water-clock didn't come easily.

'Time,' continued the skinny old crow (and Father Tutor did look exactly like a crow sometimes, in his long black robes, with his little spindly legs sticking out underneath) 'is all too often compared to a river; so often, in fact, that our minds skip off the comparison like a file drawn along a hard edge, and we no longer bother with it. But if we pause for a while and put aside our contemptuous familiarity, we may find the similarities illuminating.'

Next to him on the floor, Gain Aciava shuffled and stifled a yawn. Gain had problems keeping still in lectures, too; he couldn't be doing with theory at any price, reckoning that no amount of half-baked mysticism was going to help him get his sword out of the scabbard and into the bad guys any quicker. Actually, Ciartan didn't agree. He had an idea that at least a tenth of what the old fool told them in lectures might actually be helpful, if only he could figure out what it meant. He looked off to one side and as he did so caught sight of Xipho Dorunoxy; she'd been watching him, and quickly turned away. Now that was interesting 'A river is substantial,' said Father Tutor, 'and yet its components have no substance. You can't hold on to water in your hands, just as you can't seize hold of time. A river is always there, and yet the water in it is never the same. A river is not an object so much as a process confined inside a shape; and the same, of course, is true of time. When, therefore, we come to consider the draw,' he continued; paused, sneezed, wiped his nose on his sleeve and went on: 'When we consider the draw, the relevance should be obvious. The draw is an exercise in time; in the broadest possible terms, the draw is an attempt to eliminate time, because we all want to do it as quickly as possible. But before we can eliminate a thing, first we must properly understand what it is.'

Carefully, just in case Xipho was watching, Ciartan looked sideways. She was sitting with her hands folded in her lap, looking straight ahead-not at the old fool, but at a space on the wall slightly above and to the right of his head. She'd been taking notes, because the lid was off her inkwell and she was holding her rather fine ivory-handled pen; but now the nib was dry. He realised he'd been watching her rather longer than was safe, and turned away before anybody noticed what he was doing.

'Time in the draw,' said the old fool, absent-mindedly picking at a tiny scab on the back of his left hand, 'is what separates the decision to act from the act itself. Let us call the decision to act, the past-because the decision arises out of things that have happened to us, a perceived danger, orders from an officer in battle, an insult or an incentive; therefore the decision is the past, and in our river analogy is represented by the source of the river. The act itself is the present, because it is substantive, positive; it constitutes the latest turn of events, until it is in turn superseded by another act. Accordingly, it represents the river lapping at our feet. The consequences of the act lie in the future-consequences that will, in due course, motivate further decisions and further acts, just as the present cools into the past, and the rain falls on the mountains. The draw, then: the draw is only the gap between the past and the present, and as such-logically speaking-it cannot and does not exist. Between the decision to Cut and the cut there can be no interval of delay-logically speaking.'

Ciartan yawned. Drivel time, he thought. Pity; up till then, the old fool had sounded like he was about to make some kind of sense.

'We are faced, then,' said Father Tutor, 'with a gap; a hole in nature. We confront something that isn't there, because it can't be there, but which we know is there, because we experience it every time we lay hand to hilt. To understand this paradox, let us consider the act of casting a statue in bronze. An image is carved out of wax or tallow and packed in clay or sand. Then the mould is heated, the wax melts and pours out through a drain hole, and leaves behind a gap, an absence. It has no substance, this gap or void; it can't be touched or held, it is merely a shape confined between two definitions. And yet, when the molten bronze is poured in, it takes on the shape left behind by the melted wax, imposing its will on the substantial material, even though itself it has no form. In other words, it's a process; a process confined between parameters, just like time, or the river; or, of course, the draw. In the act of casting, the gap, the process, is memory. In the river, the gap is water. In the draw-as should now be obvious, if you've been following at all-the gap is religion. If we could pour molten bronze into the gap between the decision to draw and the cutting of the flesh, we could cast for ourselves a perfect image of a deity-or, as the proponents of the Morevish heresy would assert, of Poldarn the Destroyer.'

Ciartan gave up. He'd tried resisting. He'd tried rubbing his eyes, kicking his own ankle, digging his nails into the palm of his hand. He'd done his best, but it was no bloody good. He apologised to the old fool under his breath, and closed his eyes.

'The Morevish heresy,' the skinny old crow repeated. (Was he still the old fool, or was he really a crow now? In which case this was just a dream.) 'We call it that, and certainly it has no place in the orthodoxy, rightly so given that its very premisses are idolatry. But we should consider it with an open mind, just as we looked more closely at the trite metaphor of the river. In the Morevish heresy, Poldarn the Destroyer visits our mortal world shortly before the destruction of all things; he comes from outside time, being an immortal god, and he comes on behalf of the past, since the destruction he brings is punishment for the wickedness of mankind-our sins being the source of the river, rising in the bad acts we have committed. But he has no memory of who he is or why he's here among us, or what he's come to do; past, present, future are all missing, and all that remains in their place is a gap, an empty space confined between parameters. Poldarn, in other words, represents the process. Poldarn is the draw-according, that is, to the people of Morevich. And here is a significant point; because, according to tradition, in the distant past when Poldarn first left this world, boarding the ship that would carry him away to the timeless islands in the far West-at that time, long ago, the people of Morevich didn't communicate one with another as we do, speaking out loud and listening to what we hear. Instead, they communicated directly, mind to mind, hearing each other's thoughts inside their heads, so that words were largely unnecessary. Which is how, it goes without saying, they were able to form the concept of Poldarn-because speech is also an intangible, a process confined between parameters, an empty gap that shapes matter. But the men of Morevich did what we claim is impossible: they eliminated the non-existent gap we call speech, and so could proceed directly, thought to thought. In Morevich, therefore, the draw is also possible

At precisely the moment when Ciartan fell asleep, Poldarn woke up -Because someone was shaking him by the shoulder and yelling in his ear, 'Get up, you idle bastard, or Banspati'll do his block.'

Poldarn crawled out through the wreckage of his dream like a man escaping from an overturned cart; all around him, in his mind, were splintered fragments of truth, like the flotsam from a shipwreck. Gain Aciava, younger but still basically the same-he'd looked older than his age as a boy, younger than he really was twenty years on. And Copis, Xipho Dorunoxy. He'd been in love with her then, that thunderstruck passion, that religion that strikes only when we're too young to know any better. And who else, who else had been in the classroom with them? Twenty or so students, but he'd not been paying attention. He had been paying attention, in a way, to the skinny old crow part of the time, and to the slender, bony, long-limbed girl, but apart from that he hadn't allowed his concentration to wander, and so he hadn't studied the other faces in the room, and so he'd missed the whole point of the lesson. Typical.

'What?' he mumbled.

'Meeting,' snarled the voice-some man he only knew by sight and didn't much like anyway. 'In the coalhouse, compulsory or else. They're all waiting for you. Move!'

Just as well I was so tired I fell asleep in my clothes, with my boots on, Poldarn thought.

On the way to the long, dark coalhouse Poldarn and his escort passed the casting yard where the mould stood, shrouded under a thick swathe of tanned hides to keep out the damp. He remembered: today was the day, everything was ready for the pour. After the final frantic preparations, he'd scuttled away to get a few hours' sleep while the scrap bronze was packed into the cupola and melted; four hours, maybe five. What time was it? And why the hell have a compulsory meeting? Either the metal was ready to pour, or it wasn't. Nothing to have a meeting about.

As Poldarn shuffled into the coalhouse, a hundred heads turned and scowled at him. Just what he needed.

'Right.' Banspati's voice, clearly at the very furthest reach of his rope. 'That's the lot, we're all here. Now listen up, all of you, this is really important.'

Nobody heckled, joked, or said a word. Why? Because they're frightened, Poldarn realised with a jolt of panic. Terrified. For the gods' sakes; I close my eyes for five minutes and suddenly the world's all different.

Banspati-standing on an upturned crate-was about to say something else, but he stopped and jumped down quickly, a man anxious to get out of the way. His place was taken by a short, stocky man with white hair and a big nose. Friendly sort of face, bright blue eyes. For some reason, Poldarn knew before the short man said a word that he was an army officer.

'My name,' the man said, 'is Brigadier Muno Tesny.' Pause. 'If my name sounds familiar, it's because you've almost certainly heard of my nephew, General Muno Silsny, commander-in-chief of land forces. I've come here today to brief you on a very important commission which you're about to undertake on behalf of the general staff and, ultimately, the Emperor himself.'

In the privacy of the coalhouse's darkness, Poldarn frowned. So the Emperor wants a new doorbell. For that they send a brigadier, and I get jerked out of my pit at crack of dawn on a pour day. Well, quite possibly yes; it's just what you'd expect from an emperor, these exaggerated notions of his own importance.

'I've spoken with your foreman-' Nod to Banspati hunched in the front row; Banspati winced back, as if trying to disclaim all complicity. 'And I've informed him that this commission will, of course, take priority over all other commitments, effective immediately. Accordingly, the project you've been working on has been cancelled, and the treasury department will indemnify you against any financial losses you may incur as a result. From now on, until further notice, you'll be working for me, full time and exclusively, until this commission has been completed. Is that clear?'

If the brigadier had been expecting questions, he didn't get any. No wonder; they were all scared rigid.

'The next point I have to impress on you,' the army man went on, 'is the need for absolute security and discretion. It is essential' (he made the word weigh a ton) 'that nobody outside this building gets to know anything about the nature of the work you'll be doing. To this end, it's my duty to inform you that any act or omission on your part tending towards a breach of security will be considered an act of treason and punished accordingly.'

Oh well, Poldarn thought; presumably the old bastard didn't come here to make friends, so he wasn't going to be heartbroken about failing in that regard. So 'Now,' the brigadier said, 'we come to the nature of the commission.' He paused, for effect as much as for breath. One thing was certain, he had their undivided attention. 'Some of you may be familiar with a type of conjuring trick commonly known as Morevich Thunder; another name for it, so I'm told, is Poldarn's Fire. The trick consists of a standard baked-clay pot, into which a mixture of charcoal, sulphur and ordinary tanner's curing salts is packed; a lamp wick is inserted, and the pot is then sealed with soft, cold wax. When the wick is lit, the mixture catches fire and erupts into flame, rather like a volcano, making a sound like thunder. In Morevich these devices are used as part of religious ceremonies, parades and general festivities; they've always been regarded as a curiosity, mildly amusing but highly dangerous if carelessly handled or abused.'

Copis, Poldarn thought: she'd had a boxful of the things, used them as part of the god-in-the-cart routine. That they were also known as Poldarn's Fire didn't surprise him in the least.

The army man cleared his throat and went on. 'Armourers working directly for the general staff,' he said, 'have made a careful study of these devices, and have concluded that in these toys may lie the answer to the threat posed to the whole empire by the foreign pirates generally known as the raiders. It is the view of our best armoury officers that if the Morevich Thunder mixture is packed into a stout bronze tube sealed at one end, the force of the eruption will be sufficient to hurl a stone or an iron ball with enough force to do tremendous damage. Given a large enough stone, it might be possible to break down a wall, or-' theatrical pause '-or to sink a ship. As you all know, it has in the past proved beyond our ability to contain the raiders' forces once they land. Neither do we possess sufficient naval strength-or, quite frankly, skill-to engage them by sea. If, however, we could contrive to sink their ships while they were still at sea, by means of weapons operating from shore batteries, we believe that the devastating and intolerable attacks that the Empire has suffered over the last eighty years could be discouraged and ultimately brought to an end. In other words, the Morevich Thunder project could mean an end to the raiders, and thereby, without exaggeration, the salvation of the Empire.'

Total silence. It was obvious that nobody had the faintest idea what the old bastard was talking about, but that wasn't stopping them hanging on his every word. Of course he hadn't mentioned money yet; but the salvation of the Empire… It had to be worth more than making a few lousy bells, surely 'Your task,' the army man continued, 'will be to cast the bronze tubes. Since this is an entirely new field, it necessarily follows that any designs or specifications our people have to offer you will be mere theoretical conjecture. You have been chosen because your foundry has a reputation for casting the very finest bells in the Empire; also, your secluded location will make the job of enforcing security that much easier-'

(He had to go and spoil it, Poldarn thought. Even so.)

'To be brutally frank,' the brigadier went on, 'we chose a bell foundry because the nearest thing to one of these tubes that anybody could envisage was a bell; a bell is, after all, a bronze tube, open at one end. That is more or less as far as we can take you; the rest is up to you, your skill, experience and ingenuity. You will, of course, receive all possible support in terms of resources, equipment, specialist supplies, additional manpower-'

And money; please don't forget the money…

(Making a weapon that'd be used to kill his own people-Asburn, at the forge, and Cetil, who'd shown him how to prune fruit trees, and Raffen, and Lothbrook who was so handy at mending furniture, and Carey-no, wait, he'd killed Carey with his own hands, for what had seemed like a very good reason at the time. Even so… But the army man's bronze-tube thing wasn't going to work, not in a thousand years, so there'd be no actual harm done.)

'-And in return, we will expect nothing less than your very best efforts and your complete devotion to the success of the project. It's nothing less than the truth to say that the eyes of the general staff, the court, the palace itself are currently fixed on Tin Chirra-'

(Idiot, Poldarn muttered to himself. This is Dui Chirra. Tin Chirra's ten miles up the valley)

'I myself,' said the army man, rather grimly, 'will be stationed here with my staff to supervise progress and liaise with the general staff on your behalf. A team of our best men from Torcea arsenal will shortly be arriving to brief you on the technical side; they'll demonstrate the Morevich compound and give you the preliminary designs for the first experimental prototypes. I have to inform you that from this moment, nobody is allowed to leave the foundry premises for any reason whatsoever without written permission from myself. If this is inconvenient for any of you, I can only apologise; I hope I've said enough to prove to you that such precautions are justified and essential where a project of this importance is concerned. If you have any specific questions, please see me privately after the meeting. Thank you for your attention.'

The brigadier, with Banspati in tow, left the shed in dead silence, which lasted for maybe half a minute after the doors had shut behind him. Then everybody started talking at once.

Over the next couple of days, during which time nothing at all happened (they could have cast the Falcata guild bell and done most of the grinding, but the army man had said abandon the job, so they'd abandoned it) opinion among the foundrymen polarised into two extremes. The lesser faction, led by Malla Ancona and tentatively supported by half the pattern shop (though with numerous reservations), held that nothing good could come of a project that nobody seemed to know anything about, which entailed backing out of a contract-didn't matter that the government were buying them out of it, assuming they'd be as good as their word (hardly a certainly where government was concerned); what was important was the damage they'd do to their good name for reliability in the trade, which was where they'd be spending the rest of their working lives once this daft caper was over and done with. The majority view, however, was that nothing on earth beat government work, which was basically a golden opportunity to overcharge, pad invoices, fiddle supply requisitions and pass off shoddy work as first-class trade practice. Better still in this instance: because nobody had a clue how to make the bronze tubes, or had any reason to believe they'd do what they were supposed to even if they were built a hundred and ten per cent according to spec, it was going to be the next best thing to impossible to define failure. So when the tubes shattered into bits every time they were tested, it wouldn't be anybody's fault, and so there'd be no need to bother or make any kind of effort; just put in an appearance around the yard, look busy when anyone in uniform was watching, and draw wages at the first and last of the month. Every craftsman's dream, working for the State. Wasn't there a saying, 'Good enough for government work'? Meaning a three-eighths pin peened over to snag-fit in a seven-sixteenths hole, or cracked woodwork pinned back together and bodged over with sawdust and glue?

(A third faction, consisting solely of Spenno the pattern-master, spent both days locked away in the boiler-shed loft with half a Tulice red cheese, a quarter-barrel of death's-head cider, and his precious copy of Concerning Various Matters. As far as this faction was concerned, the project posed a fascinating technical challenge of the kind that crops up only once in a lifetime. Anybody other than Spenno would've been dunked in the river for such a disgusting display of keenness; but since it was him, nobody took any notice.)

'I mean, yes,' a melt hand called Chainbura explained to the two dozen or so men who'd gathered from force of habit round the curing fire in the south corner of the yard, 'the whole idea's bloody ridiculous, just like you'd expect from a bunch of army blokes who wouldn't know hot metal if you poured it down the back of their trousers. So bloody what, so long as we get paid. And since it's not like we got any choice in the matter, I can't say as I can see what you buggers're cribbing about. Quit whining and let's get on with it, I say. I mean, it's got to be better than work.'

'Missing the point's what you're doing,' someone objected at the back, 'which is about right for you front-yard buggers. We aren't working for the government, we're working for the fucking army; and that's a completely different kettle of fish, you hear what I'm saying? Army's all bull and procedure and chits for every bloody thing you use and checks every five minutes to see if you're doing it right-and if they don't know bugger-all either, they just make it up as they go along, anything so's they can give you a bollocking. I was in the army nine years, I know all about it, and I'm telling you-'

Poldarn had tried to take an interest, just to be sociable, but he found he couldn't even muster a convincing pretence. One significant difference between the others and himself was that he'd actually seen a Morevich Thunder-pot in action, and the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that the army's wild scheme might turn out to be feasible after all. The implications of that weren't appealing, given who was likely to be underneath the flying stones if ever they got launched in anger. Needless to say, this wasn't a concern he could share with anybody. Neither was the matter that occupied far more of his attention than the new project.

He hadn't had any dreams (that he could remember) since the one about the lecture, when he'd been staring at Xipho Dorunoxy when she wasn't looking. Probably just as well; there'd been enough solid material needing to be digested in that dream to last him a month. And the unavoidable conclusion, which he'd tried to dodge and fence away from but which kept coming back at him like two crows mobbing a hawk, was that Gain Aciava had been telling the truth, or a part of it, at any rate.

What about that?

Poldarn thought about it for a while, as the foundrymen argued the toss and grew steadily more angry with each other. In the end he came to the conclusion that it was like being chased by his own shadow; it could never actually catch him, but it'd never give up trying.

On the third day, Spenno the pattern-master came down from his loft like some ascetic prophet from a mountain top, with three days' stubble on his usually butter-soft chin, and a huge grin. He'd got it figured out, he announced; basically, it was the same as founding a bell, only At that point, somebody cleared his throat and invited Spenno to meet the armoury men.

There were four of them: a bearded man, very short, with arms as thick as an ordinary man's legs, and three long, thin clerks, spindly like unthinned trees in an unmanaged forest. The short man smiled, stepped forward on recognising his opposite number, and identified himself as Galand Dev, chief pattern-maker to the royal arsenal at Torcea. He'd been looking forward to meeting Spenno, he went on, because he'd heard a great deal about his innovative work in hinged cupola casting, and the initial designs he'd come up with depended heavily on the use of a cupola furnace. Spenno glared at him for a few long moments, then pretended he wasn't there; looked past him, and carried on with his announcement where he'd left off. He'd finally cracked it, he declared; basically the same as casting a bell, only 'Excuse me,' Galand Dev interrupted quietly (far more effective than shouting), 'but there seems to be some confusion here. I'm sorry, somebody should have told you. I'm in charge of the design work-'

Spenno stared at him, as though the short man had just materialised out of thin air. 'Who the fucking hell are you?' he asked politely.

'Galand Dev,' the short man repeated, in a soft, reasonable voice. 'Chief pattern-master at the Arsenal. I designed the tubes. And what I've been meaning to ask you is, do you think your local greensand has enough body to hold a simple wired core, or-'

'Piss off,' said Spenno.

One of the clerks tried to punch Spenno in the mouth. A huge foundryman by the name of Salyan grabbed the clerk's fist in mid-air and yanked his arm behind his back. With a mild sigh, the short man took a step forward, kicked Salyan in the groin so hard that the crack echoed off the barn roof, and finished the job with a short, horrible punch to the side of the head. Salyan rolled sideways and lay still. Nobody moved.

'He'll be all right,' the short man sighed. 'Now, please, if we could all get back to the job in hand. This greensand of yours-'

Poldarn left them to get on with it. He remembered that he had a little job of his own to finish, and chances were that once Spenno and the government man had sorted out their professional differences, there wouldn't be much spare time to waste on personal projects. He wandered across to the forge and got a fire in.

He'd left it about half done; the shape was more or less there, but so vague that only he could see it, because he knew what he was looking for. He forged in the bevels, trapping the inside edge of the flat tapered bar between the anvil's horn and the hammer; it was slow, patient work, only a few hard, careful hammer-blows each time before the steel had to go back in the fire and take on more heat. The profile and geometry of the bevels had to be perfect, since each hammer-fall squeezed a dab of orange steel up into the body of the work, subtly twisting and distorting the shape, which meant that for every strike he made on the edge, he needed four on the flat and the spine to maintain the lines he'd drawn in his mind. Every so often he had to spend a whole heat renewing the angle of the back curve, either hammering over the horn or fixing the work in the vice and twisting it with a long rod with a U-bend on the end. It took him the rest of the day to get the bevels done, and he decided to leave it at that. No point starting on the fullers and having to abandon the job part-way through. And he was still on the easy bit.

After what passed for dinner (the rains were still up on the road, though the level was perceptibly dropping, half an inch a day; fairly soon it'd reach the point where the drainage rhines began drawing again, the level would drop by a foot overnight and the food wagons from Tin Chirra could get through again) Poldarn drifted over to one of the watchfires to toast a slice of cheese onto a slab of stale grey bread. Nobody looked up as he joined the ring round the fire; theirs was a circle that could be broken into without risking bloodshed.

'That woman they got with them,' someone was saying, 'the crazy bitch who's into all that religious stuff. They reckon she's the worst of the lot.'

'Worse than the Mad Monk?' Someone on the other side of the circle wasn't convinced. 'Don't believe it. Women aren't like that.'

That amused someone else. 'You never met my old lady,' he said. General laughter. 'No, I mean it,' whoever it was went on. 'I remember one time-she'd been on the cider, mind, and I'd done something or other, never did find out what; anyhow, she got really mad at me, came and stood over me while I was eating my dinner, yelling and carrying on, scaring the kids to death. Well, I wasn't in the mood for a fight just then, I'd had a long day and you've got to feel right for a really good row, so I just got up and walked out, didn't say a word or anything. So what does she do? She follows me, still yelling her daft head off; so I go through the house into the barn, and she comes after me, still yelling and screaming, not getting the point at all-but they're like that, aren't they? So I push on through the barn to the outhouse, nip in, shut the door and put the latch across. She's hammering on the door, I'm shouting at her, fuck off, you stupid cow, I'm having a piss-which was true, as it happens. And next thing I know, she's fetched the axe out of the barn and she's smashing up the outhouse door-and I'm in there, for crying out loud, and I can see the axe blade coming in through the wood. Scared? I'm telling you, I was in the right place, or else I'd have pissed myself. If she hadn't swung wild with the axe and bust the head off the shaft, Poldarn only knows what'd have happened. Anyhow, she went inside, I waited till I thought it was safe and buggered off over the hill into town. Three days before I reckoned it was all right to come home, and then only because she sent the boy over to say that maybe she'd gone a bit too far. A bit too far-those were the exact words. Women? I promise you, when they lose it, they really lose it bad. And I guess this Dorun-whatsemame's like that, only she hasn't calmed down yet.'

Poldarn couldn't help remembering the burning of Deymeson, and Copis with a sword in her hands, straightening up into the front guard. So maybe it had just been something he'd said 'She's a nutcase, all right,' someone else said, 'but it's the Mad Monk who's the really dangerous one; because he's mad, sure enough, but not rolling-on-the-floor mad, that's not really a problem so long as you stay clear. He's more the ninety-per-cent sane type. They're the ones you got to look out for, because one minute you're standing there talking to them all nice and pleasant about the weather or the war or something, and next minute they'll pull out a knife and try and chop your bollocks off. Never know where you are with them, see.'

Nobody seemed inclined to comment on that for a while. Then someone else (Sineysri, from the mould-scraping crew) coughed nervously and said that the Mad Monk and the crazy bitch were one thing, but at least they weren't anything like as bad as Feron Amathy. 'And if you ask me,' he went on, 'absolutely the worst bloody thing they could do now is what they're planning to do, by all accounts: give Feron Amathy the job of sorting those two out.'

General mutter of agreement. 'Total disaster,' someone said. 'Those religious nutters prowling about up one end of the country, the Amathy house on the loose down the other, and us poor buggers caught in the middle. All it'd take would be for the raiders to show up, and it'd be damn well near the end of the world.'

'That's right.' Someone Poldarn knew, but couldn't put a name to: thin voice, slight speech impediment. 'If you ask me, old Tazencius has got the right idea for once with these tube things.'

'Sure,' someone interrupted. 'If only we can make bastards work.'

Muted laughter. 'That's right,' Thin-voice went on, 'and that'll only be when that little short bugger pushes off and lets Spenno alone to figure it out for them. But if it all works out, I reckon it's not the raiders they'll be wanting to point the tubes at, it's the Amathy house, followed by the Mad Monk. Then we might be getting somewhere at last.'

'You say that,' growled a deep voice from the dark edge, where Poldarn couldn't see. 'But you know exactly what'll happen, soon as they hand those tubes over to some general or other-assuming they do what they reckon they'll do, and don't just go off phut like a old ewe farting. They'll hand them over to some general and tell him, go fight the raiders or Feron Amathy or whatever; and he'll turn right round and stick 'em up Tazencius's arse, and next day we'll have a new emperor. And so on, over and over. Truth is, there's nobody in this empire you'd trust as far as you could sneeze 'em, not since Cronan died. No, the simple fact is, it's time for us here in Tulice to say enough's enough, boot the garrisons out of Falcata and Torneviz, and get on with it ourselves. Same for the folks in Morevich, and the Two Rivers country. Let those arseholes in Torcea play their games in their own back yard, and see how they like it.'

The discussion got lively after that, and Poldarn decided that it might be sensible to take his toasted cheese and eat it somewhere else, just in case Brigadier Muno or one of his staff were hanging about somewhere in the shadows, learning a few illuminating facts about the loyalties of some of the workers engaged on his last-best-hope project.

Brigadier Muno: if he'd got it straight (he sat down under a cart, one of the monsters they used for hauling the finished bells-huge wheels, plenty of room under them to sit upright, and the dropped sides kept out the night breeze), then this Brigadier Muno was the uncle of the sad young cavalry officer he'd saved from looters and scavengers in the aftermath of some damn-fool battle or other, when he'd come across him lying all bloody beside a river, surrounded by dead men. Whether that memory was an asset or a liability he wasn't entirely sure. The officer he'd carried on his back as far as the man's unit's camp had been properly grateful at the time; but now he was a very grand general, and his attitude to previous benefactors might have warped a little, like sawn planks left lying in the wet. A lot would depend, for a start, on whether Muno Silsny recognised him if and when he saw him again; if not, and if the story of the river rescue was tolerably well known, Poldarn could turn up at the great man's tent only to find he was the fifteenth person that week to have come forward claiming to be the general's personal angel of mercy. That could be enough to embarrass a man to death.

And, since it appeared that he was in a contemplative mood and thinking about old times: what if Gain Aciava had been telling the truth…?

That old question again. It was beginning to lose its meaning, like a word endlessly repeated until it became a mere sound. Besides, Poldarn knew the answer, and entirely unhelpful it was, too: Some of what Gain Aciava told me was almost certainly true.

But that was only a starting point. A better question was: What did Gain Aciava want from me? It had to be something to do with Copis; because she was a celebrity now, a household name-the mad woman, the crazy bitch. (And how had she got that way?) But he couldn't bring himself to believe in any of that. Not her style, madness; she'd stood and watched him kill people-soldiers, two successive gods-in-the-cart-and the only aspect of it that had seemed to bother her was the inconvenience, the interference with her plans. He'd seen her angry, but that was something else entirely. Even at Deymeson, she'd been entirely rational when she'd tried to kill him.

If their child was still alive, he'd be about three years old now. He or she.

So what use would Poldarn be to Gain Aciava in some matter relating to Copis? To use against her, presumably, since she was a public enemy and therefore liable to be worth money, or money's worth. But in what way? She felt quite strongly about him, for sure, but Aciava seemed to know all about the terms on which they'd parted, so it wasn't likely that his role was bait for a trap (unless she hated him enough to take foolish risks to get at him, which he doubted). It'd help, of course, if he knew what she was really playing at.

Then again, it was possible that the fall of Deymeson and the ruin of the order had unhinged Copis's mind. She must have believed in it, loved it, to do what she'd done with him, to him, on its behalf. He could almost believe that, until he remembered her eyes. (Cold, bright, always full of life, always devoid of feeling; he couldn't see her going mad for the fall of the order, just as he couldn't see her dying for it. Living for it, yes, even if her life had become an intolerable burden. But Copis wasn't the dying sort.)

A dog was peering at Poldarn through the spokes of the cartwheel, as if he was some strange new animal never hitherto seen in those parts. He reached about for a stone to throw at it, but couldn't find one.

The sensible thing, of course, would be to find Gain Aciava and ask him. Quite likely he'd only get lies or evasions, but any kind of data was better than none at all. But that was out of the question-all leave cancelled, nobody to leave the premises without written permission, deserters hunted down without mercy. Maybe Poldarn could have written Aciava a letter, if he had any idea where to send it and some way of getting it out past the brigadier's soldiers. Instead, all he could do was wait and see what snippets of information he could scrounge out of his own dreams. Hardly scientific. Poldarn stretched out his legs as far as they'd go, closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep; and-to his intense disgust upon waking-dreamed an entirely unhelpful dream about haymaking at Haldersness when he'd been seven.

The technical debate between the armoury man, Galand Dev, and Spenno the pattern-maker was rapidly evolving into a full-scale religious war. The point of dogma at issue was whether the tubes should be cast pointing up or down. Not surprisingly, Spenno espoused the orthodox view. He declared that the tubes should be cast just like a bell, with the open end pointing downwards. Galand Dev maintained that the solid core of the mould, which would create the hollow inside the tube, should hang from the top of the mould rather than stand up inside it, which meant casting the tubes with the open end pointing upwards; he reckoned that if they used the traditional method of melting out tallow to leave a gap for the bronze to flow into, the core might shift position during the burn-out, which would result in a tube whose hole wasn't straight down the middle. His version did away with tallow altogether, and relied on four pins to hold the core suspended ('dangling,' Spenno declared scathingly, 'like an old man's balls') in the exact centre of a hollow clay tube.

As clashes of conflicting faiths went, it was rather more logical and comprehensible than, say, the cause of the devastating schism that had torn the Empire apart during the reign of Nikaa the Third. That conflict had stemmed from the refusal of the Congregationalists to admit that two hundred years earlier a monk had miscalculated the date of a minor irregular festival, in spite of the claims of the Revisionists that a divine messenger with the wings of an eagle and the head of a lion had appeared to their leader in a vision and told him the shelf and docket number in the archives of the file in which the incriminating documents were stored.

What the core debate lacked in picturesque embellishment, however, it amply made up for in passion and intractability. Spenno immediately retaliated with a whole decalogue of concerns about porosity, stress fractures and crystalline structure, all supported by citations from Concerning Various Matters. When Galand Dev refused to accept the infallibility of Spenno's adored book, the pattern-maker flew into such a terrible rage that only Galand Dev's extraordinary reflexes saved him from being stabbed with the sharp ends of a pair of heavy brass calipers. Thereafter, the two opposing factions communicated strictly in writing, with two teams of messengers being kept busy carrying furiously scribbled notes backwards and forwards between Galand Dev in the pattern office and Spenno's headquarters in the boiler-shed loft. Whether either Galand or Spenno managed to spare time from writing their own notes to read each other's was a moot point; unless they could read and write at the same time, it was hard to see how it could have been done.

('Plain fact is,' Banspati muttered gloomily, as the foundrymen crowded round the yard fire on the third evening of the debate, 'neither of them's got a fucking clue. You go trying to cast a tube that thick with a hole down the middle, you'll get the metal at the edges cooling faster'n the metal in the middle, and the whole bloody lot'll crack like ice at midday. If you ask me, it just can't be done and that's that; which means the best thing to do is cast one arse-up and one arse-down; and when they both fall to bits soon as look at 'em, maybe all the government bastards'll piss off back to Torcea and let us get on with some work.')

When the argument had been raging for five days and still showed no sign of calming down, almost the entire foundry crew had divided, in roughly equal proportions, into factions supporting one or other of the two rival doctrines. In most cases, adherence to a faction had precious little to do with the merits of arse-up or arse-down, and was rather more closely concerned with whether the man in question hated the government more than he hated Spenno. Poldarn, who had mixed feelings about both sides, did his best to steer clear of the subject every time it came up in conversation; but since there was nothing for the men to do all day except talk and nothing else that anyone wanted to talk about, he didn't really have any choice. Rather than make the effort to follow technical arguments he couldn't really understand, he fell into the habit of agreeing with whoever he was talking to and hoped nobody would notice how quickly his loyalties tended to change.

In the event, Galand Dev won the argument-up to a point-by adopting a wider fame of reference, or cheating. When Brigadier Muno complained to him that time was getting on with nothing he could put in his dispatches that the people back in Torcea would want to read, Dev replied that there really wasn't anything to argue about-he was right and Spenno was wrong-but that the workers weren't prepared to believe him without a compelling reason to do so. Muno nodded, and said that compelling reasons were easy. Then he sent for Banspati and told him that, for security reasons, he was putting the Virtue Triumphant out of bounds; at least, he added meaningfully, until such time as Spenno and Galand Dev could agree on how they were going to do the job, and something was actually achieved.

Banspati didn't like that one bit. True, the Virtue had officially been off limits from the start, but nobody had taken the prohibition seriously, figuring that nobody, not even a government administrator, could be that cruel and unfeeling. Quite apart from the beer, the Virtue housed a dozen or so tired-looking, sad-eyed women whose job was to part the foundrymen from their money on a regular basis. As the foundrymen themselves used to say, they weren't much but they were a damn sight better than nothing, and therefore essential to the smooth running of the foundry. Muno's prohibition, Banspati knew without having to be told, was likely to prove considerably more explosive than anything the alchemists of Morevich ever brewed up in one of their little clay pots. After a stunned silence, therefore, he promised Muno that he'd talk to Spenno right away and see if there wasn't some middle ground that might be acceptable to both parties.

Whatever he said to Spenno, for three quarters of an hour up in the boiler-house loft while the foundry crew milled about angrily in the yard below, it probably didn't have much to do with porosity, stress fractures or crystalline structure, but it did the trick. Spenno, looking suitably chastened and watched in furious silence by his assembled colleagues, scuttled down from his loft and across the yard towards Galand Dev's command post in the drawing office. Ten minutes later, the two men appeared at the door and announced that they'd got it all figured out, and work on the first prototype would start at dawn the next day. Meanwhile, anybody who cared to celebrate the reconciliation with a brief visit to the Virtue was free to do so, provided that they were in a fit state for work come morning.

Very soon afterwards, the yard was deserted. Poldarn, for his part, couldn't be bothered to go; instead, he crossed over to the forge and spent the rest of the day by the fire, drawing down, splitting, shaping and jumping up. By evening, his strip of odd-looking steel had taken on a definite and unique shape; like a leaping dolphin with a broad, splayed tail (where the upper and lower horns of the hand-guard arched round until they almost touched). He hardened and tempered the steel with an unexpected degree of trepidation; but for once, everything went right, and the piece that emerged from the barrel of burning olive oil was unmistakably a Raider backsabre. It wasn't, Poldarn suspected, entirely perfect, but that was only to be expected of his first attempt at making such a thing, done entirely from memory. As he took a break from drawfiling out the hammer marks and speckles of forged-in firescale, it occurred to him to wonder, for the first time, what he'd actually made the thing for. If he needed to chop kindling he already had a perfectly good hand-axe. And he wasn't about to kill anybody-was he?